SMALL WORLD (ver 2)
            by Andrew Pontious (Andrew Plotkin)
            A text adventure on SynTax disk 1219
                  and on this issue's disk

                    Review by Bev Truter

"Small World" was Andrew's entry in the 1996 interactive-fiction
competition on the Net. This version is an update of the original,
and since I'd never got around to looking at or even playing the
first version, I downloaded this second version and I've been
playing it non-stop for 3 days now. Yes, I know these games are
meant to be small, and finishable in under two hours, but 'Small
World' is such a captivating game that I refused to rush through
it using the in-built hints. It's the sort of game to savour, and
wander through slowly. There are only 16 locations in Small World,
but it's a far bigger game than one suspects. This is due to the
many different actions available to you, and the intricacy of many
puzzles. The main fascination of the game though lies in its
brilliantly original storyline, and the strong ideas behind it. I
don't want to spoil the pleasure of actually playing this game for
anyone, so I'll quote parts of the introduction, just to give you
a rough idea of the plot and setting for the story.

You are a young pre-teenager, one assumes, and it's time to go off
on your first trip with the Junior Hikers your parents forced you
to join. You are not looking forward to this trip, as you are a
shy, chubby person, preferring your own company. Just before
leaving your room you spin the globe your eccentric great-aunt
gave you for your tenth birthday. But the globe seems stuck.
That's odd - you've turned it a million times before, while
dreaming of your own little world on endless afternoons. The
rivers and mountains on the globe appear to be expanding somehow
as you watch. Or are you getting smaller? The room around you
fades to black as you tumble forward and land unsteadily on your
feet on a white circle...more like a dome really, as it bends
downwards in all directions.

Your adventure starts then, on top of the "small world", and
you'll soon discover what your main task is in the game. Finding a
way to put things right takes quite some time though, and there's
plenty to do and see along the way. The one major NPC in Small
World, The Devil, is an absolute hoot. Apparently The Devil won
the award in the 1996 competition for "Best NPC in a game" - and I
can see why. He will amuse, provoke and irritate you in about
equal doses, and I almost regretted having to dispose of him to
win the game. There is one other character to interact with - St.
Pete - but his repertoire isn't as vast as the Devil's.

I played Small World with the new version (2.2.6) of TADS, which
gives you the option, before starting, of easily setting the
colour schemes of text and background colour to whatever
combination you fancy. Andrew Plotkin is obviously an expert user
of TADS, and Small World has a very professional feel to it
overall. The command HELP brings up a menu of useful words, such
as INSTRX which brings up full instructions for playing text games
for beginners, INFO for special information and commands for
playing Small World, and typing HINT from within the game
activates the in-built hint system.

Small World has a maximum score of 1 point. Well, as the game
says, "it's a small world: there's a small scoring system." Your
score (or lack of it) starts at .00, and goes up by .02, .03, or
even a *whopping* .10 of a point each time you solve a particular
puzzle. The puzzles in Small World are fairly difficult. I found
many solutions quite obscure - not in the wording used, but in the
kind of lateral thinking needed to solve some extraordinary
problems. But this only makes the game more entertaining.

Although Small World is small in size / number of locations, it
has a large scope. I found it to be full of hidden meanings and
subtle ideas, as well as a few clever references to some icons of
modern American culture. This is surely the first ever all-text
God-game, and I loved it. It's a wonderfully novel plot, with a
really satisfying ending; great work, Andrew!

@~I've put this game on this issue's disk - the solution was
@~printed in Issue 62 if you should get stuck ... Sue

                              - o -